The first week was strange. I expected a retaliatory message, an angry post, or another car idling across the street. None came. Her accounts were quiet or, at least, quiet where I could see them. Billie sent one brief message saying the order had been served and that Doris and her husband were encouraging Minerva to seek counseling and begin paying toward household expenses. I thanked her and asked that we leave further updates alone unless there was a safety issue.
I didn't need to know whether Minerva agreed with the order. I didn't need a recording of her reaction. I didn't need Landon to call and apologize again, or her mother to write another check, or strangers online to declare me the winner. I needed her to respect the boundary, and for the first time since the engagement dinner, it appeared that she was doing so.
Rebecca and I went away for a weekend in late summer. We stayed in a small cabin beside a lake, the kind of place with creaking steps and a porch that smelled of pine after rain. I was nervous about leaving the house unattended, even with the cameras and my neighbor keeping an eye on things. On the drive, Rebecca noticed that I had checked my phone three times in twenty minutes.
"Is there something we need to deal with?" she asked.
"No. I'm just checking."
"Checking what?"
I thought about that. "Whether the quiet is still quiet."
She looked at the road for a moment. "Then maybe we can give it a chance to be quiet without asking it to prove itself every five minutes."
I put the phone in the glove compartment. For the first hour, I kept noticing that it wasn't in my pocket. Then the road curved through a stand of trees, the radio played a song I hadn't heard in years, and Rebecca began telling me about a patient who had insisted her therapy exercises would go better if everyone sang along. I laughed, then asked what song they'd chosen. By the time we reached the cabin, I had gone nearly ninety minutes without thinking about Minerva.
We spent the weekend hiking, cooking meals that were only moderately successful, and sitting on the porch beneath a sky so full of stars it made me forget the subdivision lights back home. On Sunday morning, Rebecca asked whether I ever felt guilty for being happy while someone I'd once loved was struggling. The question surprised me. I admitted that I did, sometimes. I'd spent two years responding to Minerva's distress as though it were my personal responsibility to solve it.
"You can hope she's okay without agreeing to make yourself responsible for making her okay," Rebecca said.